Random Rants & Raves

Windows 7 has a ton of new enhancements right there in the Taskbar itself. A quick list of them includes:

• Unified Launching and Switching
• Jump Lists
• Destinations
• Tasks
• Thumbnail Toolbars
• Icon Overlays
• Progress Bars
• Notification Area
• Interactive Thumbnails

Your applications too can start using these features’ in them if you want. The documentation for these are available at MSDN here. The only issue is that this is currently possible only with un-managed APIs – COM & Win32.

So what happens if you’re a .NET WinForms/WPF developer and want these features in your applications as well? Well, fear not there is a way out. There are two open source projects that allow you to use the Win7 taskbar enhancements in your managed code applications as well.

The first is a project on CodePlex called Windows 7 TaskBar Extensions. This is a new project with only a few things currently implemented but seems to be heading in the right direction for a small, lean implementation of the Taskbar features in .NET.

The second is a much more comprehensive project called very simply “Windows 7 Taskbar”. This is based upon the excellent Vista Bridge library and offers all the features that are currently possible. There are a number of sample applications as well that demonstrate many of the different features. The only part that didn’t work for me is creating Jump Lists.

So if you’re a Windows application developer and want to add the new features of Vista and Windows 7 into your application, Vista Bridge and these other two libraries are surely something that you will want to try out.